In Saturn's Rings

I saw "In Saturn's Rings" at the Museum of Flight in Seattle and went back two weeks later to see it again. It's a stunningly beautiful film, mostly assembled from high-resolution pictures taken by NASA's Cassini space probe. As LeVar Burton's voiceover says, "This is real"--I appreciated that every image used in the film was taken from real photographs with no use of CGI. The film starts with a series of images demonstrating the scale of the universe and the history of human civilization, but it really hits its stride about halfway through when it focuses on the Saturn imagery. The highlight is a montage of Saturn photos using Barber's "Adagio for Strings" as backtrack. This is much more artistic than your typical documentary; the focus is on inspiration rather than information. Absolutely worth checking out.

This was such a terrible piece of cinema, what a let down! The film maker starts by insulting the audience, claiming that no one, except him, paid attention to Cassini's mission. Then they go on to "start at the beginning", using ineffective visual analogies to portray the big bang and rise of civilization with the goal (not achieved) of providing context for the Cassini mission. It's all terribly hard to follow and completely unnecessary.

About 20 minutes in we FINALLY get to the collection of images from Cassini and they are stunningly beautiful. This lasts for about 15 minutes then the film takes a heavy-handed approach of letting you know that you don't pay enough attention to science and discovery and that the film maker does and that you should be grateful that you've sat through this drool and been enlightened by them.

If you cut out the intro and outro then you're left with a great collection of the images captured by the mission. In my opinion, the film maker could have better served their goal by filling the beginning of the film with information about the people, process, and innovation that went in to creating and executing the mission ... rather than stating that the audience is a bunch of plebs. What a jerk.